Review: In ‘Pool Play 2.0,’ the Audience Is Welcome to Make a Splash

Jonathan Matthews in This Is Not a Theater Company’s “Pool Play 2.0” at the Waterside Plaza Swim & Health Club in Manhattan.

Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

By LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

March 20, 2017

Flip-flops are an option, in case you don’t want to walk barefoot across the floor. And if you’d rather sit somewhere outside the splash zone — instead of donning a poncho, perching on the edge of the pool with the rest of the audience and dangling your feet in the water — that’s allowed, too.

But at “Pool Play 2.0,” This Is Not a Theater Company’s buoyant daydream of a show, staged in a tree-lined swimming pool in Kips Bay, it’s more fun to dip your toes in and swirl them around. In this cheerful oasis on the far side of the F.D.R. Drive, overlooking the East River, the water’s warm and the water ballet is joyous.

The star and madcap choreographer of “Pool Play 2.0” is Jonathan Matthews, whose frenzied dance in the bathtub of a Brooklyn Heights brownstone was the most inspired element of the company’s “Versailles 2016” last fall. Here, like a bearded Waldo in a succession of floral swim caps, he’s decked out in red-and-white-striped top and trunks, his round-rimmed glasses on at all times. In several exuberant solos set to Handel’s “Water Music,” he twirls and somersaults, a look of wonder on his face.

A scene from “Pool Play 2.0.”

Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

The show’s director, Erin B. Mee, was swimming laps a few years ago in this pool, at Waterside Plaza Swim & Health Club, when she got the idea for the play. Reworked since its first iteration in 2014, it has principal text by Jessie Bear and three monologues by Ms. Mee’s father, the playwright Charles Mee, who has an excellent ear for the acoustical demands of the space. Elsewhere, though, sound is the problem I’d most love to see solved in a version 3.0.

Because in between the frolicsome dance numbers, Ms. Bear has some thoughtful things to say: about the history of racial segregation in public pools and beaches, about squandered water resources, about fears that keep us from jumping in even when we want to. And simply about the physical experience of being immersed in water.

“Have you ever noticed how it’s harder to notice your skin down here?” Mr. Matthews asks. “It doesn’t delimit your body anymore. It’s hard to tell where it stops and where the water starts, and if you try you find you can’t. It’s the fragile — vulnerable — border crossing between you and shapelessness.”

It’s not his fault that we don’t catch all these words. In the reverb of the room, they become garbled. Whether the actors are poolside or in the water, meaning and humor tend to slip away, and with them the necessary intimacy with the spectators. Ms. Bear’s text is often elegantly written, but it’s too dense for the setting.

So Mr. Mee’s contemplative monologues, performed by Kim Ima as she pilots an inflatable raft across the pool, are something of a relief. He structures them like verse, short lines encapsulating complete thoughts, and she speaks them that way: “and when you set sail/you might end up anywhere/don’t be afraid/just go/that’s what makes a hero/paddling into the unknown.”

I found myself wishing for more use of watercraft, more dances that tap the ensemble and — after Ashley Wren Collins’s gentle rendition of the R.E.M. song “Nightswimming” — more singing, too.

Like any site-specific piece, “Pool Play 2.0” is partly about exploring the possibilities of a space. This one is hugely challenging, but when it works, unusually rewarding.